Coinbase from YC to DPO • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#201

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

purple_ferret wrote: post #23

Coinbase is definitely a success story in how to appeal to the masses. There were always alternatives, but coinbase always came out on top despite the high fees and poor customer service. I think Coinbase as a publicly traded company will be very interesting to follow. Not only is it a massively cyclical industry, but the supposed point of crypto is to reducing the reliance on, and grifting from, companies like Coinb…

In the past, Bitcoin exchanges IMO felt shady. They frequently were run from foreign countries and got away with avoiding Know-Your-Customer banking laws.

Coinbase brought a true sense of legitimacy and trustworthiness to Bitcoin exchanging.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#202

Post by deckard1 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

colinmhayes wrote: post #155

delaaxe wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC is already mostly powered by green

The green energy used by bitcoin miners would be used by others if bitcoin didn't exist. Instead those others use dirty electricity.

It's weird seeing this argument that green energy is somehow free and infinite energy.

And yet, look at the market for Nvidia and AMD GPUs right now. The miners already know that gamers have been pushed out of the high end GPU market. Supply and demand doesn't go away. People still need electricity for doing things other than mining Bitcoin. All that happens is their electricity rates go up.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#203

Post by RazTeve » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

Fede_V wrote: post #35

I'm horrendously worried about crypto gaining more marketshare as long as proof of work crypto remains mainstream. It has significantly worse externalities than just about any company I can think of (including defense contractors/vaping companies), and, if it grows larger before we have clean energy, then we virtually guarantee we won't be able to tackle global warming. We are going to bestow a world that will be sig…

did you dismiss this one already? https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/could-bitcoin-solve-oil-...

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#204

Post by toolz » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

RobLach wrote: post #160

toolz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cardano is completely distributed PoS 46 billion market cap (5th largest crypto) - I'm not sure what you mean by "yet to be proven" it also theoretically supports 1MM tx/second - to put that into perspective VISA does somewhere in the ballpark of 2k tx/second (but theoretically can do much more than that I'm sure)

That's all still in the "research" phase.

45 billion market cap is "research phase"? Exactly what would make it move out of "research phase" then?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#205

Post by spiralx » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

rawtxapp wrote: post #84

dehrmann wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the supposed point of crypto is to reducing the reliance on, and grifting from, companies like Coinbase That was the pitch of crypto. In practice, people are buying it as a bet that it will go up. I suspect most people are only buying it because the value is going up. If bitcoin actually worked like a currency and traded between $8k and $12 for the past 5 years, no one would care.

Except currencies have much bigger market caps, it wouldn't have worked as a currency in that range (outside of a very small economy). We are now in the initial phase where it's being used as a store of value, but sooner or later, it's going to reach roughly it's true value at which point, you would expect it to behave more like a currency rather than an asset with a huge upside.

Currencies don't have market caps, assets have market caps. The fact that people talk about crypto's "market cap" is as clear an indication that it's not and never will be a currency.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#206

Post by tovej » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #153

skeeter2020 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

broad-based consumption taxes are the best theoretical response, but politically no one is going to impose them at the levels needed to discourage consumption, and they almost always get perverted in their application with carve-outs and exemptions. Plus where does that money go? At best it's an inefficient recycling paradigm when what we really need is an at-source reduction in consumption in the first place.

The goal should not be to discourage consumption, the goal should be carbon neutrality. Any industry such as fossil fuel power plants must buy carbon offset credits/tokens from industries or companies that sequester carbon. Then let the market solve the problem. The credits/tokens may turn out to be very cheap.

No credible way to decouple production/consumption from emissions has been found. So no, we do need to start curbing consumption, especially among people in the top wealth quantiles (because they consume the most).

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#207

Post by cbhl » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

Fede_V wrote: post #35

I'm horrendously worried about crypto gaining more marketshare as long as proof of work crypto remains mainstream. It has significantly worse externalities than just about any company I can think of (including defense contractors/vaping companies), and, if it grows larger before we have clean energy, then we virtually guarantee we won't be able to tackle global warming. We are going to bestow a world that will be sig…

If Coinbase gets sufficiently mainstream, I suspect it will mitigate a lot of this.

A transfer of BTC between two Coinbase users can happen off-chain, which means skipping the work necessary to mine a block including the given transaction.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#208

Post by CuriousCosmic » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

jude- wrote: post #166

jtsiskin wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the uninformed, what mathematical guarantees does POW have that POS doesn’t?

PoW is open-membership, because the means of coin production are not tied to owning coins already. All you need to contribute is computing power, and you can start earning coins at a profit. PoS is closed-membership with a veneer of open-membership, because the means of coin production are tied to owning a coin already. What this means in practice is that no rational coin-owner is going to sell you coins at a fast en…

One important difference in favour of PoS that isn't brought up often is the financial cost to pull off an attack. Pulling off an attack in most PoS protocols results in coin slashing for the attacker ("deletion" of coins used in the attack) and on top of that can (and likely will) result in coin devaluation as well. This makes a successful attack against a PoS system very very expensive. The resource is spent and actually burned.

With PoW however the GPUs or ASICs don't disappear or lose value after the attack (caveat that the ASICs can lose value if networks switch away from the algorithm it is built for). The hardware can be used to attack "competitor" networks or used again in another attack against the network or other networks in the future.

In this sense, I suspect that PoS networks are able to properly recover from successful attacks far easier as well as dissuade attacks from the offset.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#209

Post by greg7mdp » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #138

Fede_V wrote: post #35

I'm horrendously worried about crypto gaining more marketshare as long as proof of work crypto remains mainstream. It has significantly worse externalities than just about any company I can think of (including defense contractors/vaping companies), and, if it grows larger before we have clean energy, then we virtually guarantee we won't be able to tackle global warming. We are going to bestow a world that will be sig…

I'm skeptical of proof-of-stake, proof-of-work seems like the main innovation of cryptocurrencies that differentiates them from the standard financial industry? If you swap out POW for POS (or worse clearing house type trust orgs like Stellar) then aren't you just putting trust into some incentive based system no different than existing financial systems? Just instead a government you're trusting some other entity. Y…

I don't see any reason to be skeptical of proof-of-stake. The ethereum beacon network has been up and running fine for months. And POS negates the power usage objection to POW.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#210

Post by ChainOfFools » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #108

Tenoke wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt they are inflating them and it's trivial to check by going on both CB and Binance, looking at the order books and executing a few orders against them.

Right, you know in a completely unregulated market, you can just put fake things on the books yeah? Remember that ETF that was trying to list a few years ago said 95% of all volume in the crypto space was fake. [1] Now, at the time, they included Binance as a legitimate exchange but you know nobody's looking and they can do literally whatever they want. That designation is especially suspect as: > Of the 10 exchanges…

correct. the part that seems to evade people's mental model of this process is that the exchanges know which orders in the book are theirs, but the customers do not, so there's no risk whatsoever of the exchange filling an order that works against their balance sheet. it all looks perfectly organic from the outside.